Hong Kong rounded out the Puccini centenary year with Musica Viva’s new production of Il Trittico (“The Triptych”), a trio of one-act operas. Each is sufficient in itself, yet the whole magically becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Il tabarro (“The Cloak”) leads off with tragic melodrama, Suor Angelica is both spiritual and a tear-jerker, while Gianni Schicchi is Puccini’s sole foray into comic opera buffa.

Scènes de la vie de bohème is an intimate dramatic adaptation of Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera. Reduced to the four principal roles in a new musical arrangement by Marco Iannelli, this new version is designed to focus on the emotional ties between the two couples. It debuted in April 2024 in a run of special performances on Hong Kong’s iconic Star Ferry in a new production for Dante Alighieri Society and The Peninsula Hong Kong to commemorate the Puccini centenary.

The brilliant set of the Opera Hong Kong’s new production of Madama Butterfly, which opened on 6 October, is a panel set a few meters back from the front of the stage that emulates the front of a Japanese house. The room itself is set into this panel almost 2 meters above the stage floor. The ingenuity of the design however is that it also serves as a screen onto which full stage-wide and stage-high projections are cast: designs from Japanese prints, seascapes, crashing waves, gardens, calligraphy. The effects range from artistic to evocative or illusory.

2019 has been a standout year for Chinese soprano He Hui: the debut of three new roles; a successful run at the Met, including her debut Met Live in HD performance in Madama Butterfly and her 15th consecutive year (a first for a soprano) of singing at the Arena di Verona. And this weekend, He comes full circle as she returns to the Shanghai Grand Theatre, where she made her operatic debut in 1998, to perform Turandot, the Chinese princess of Puccini’s opera of the same name.

Opera plots can often strain credulity; Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, on the other hand, cuts close to the bone. The story—of an American naval officer who woos, marries and deserts a young Japanese girl—matters: it is a tightly-constructed narrative and attempts to reframe it, reposition it in another time or place, can be fraught.